50: Fully Bearded Child

Jim and Dan talk about Apple's broken promise (iCloud), Google Reader, Fever, NetNewsWire, Black Pixel, Newsfire, iTunes Purchase fraud, WifiSLAM, the value of Apple stock, guitars, and more.

Links for this episode:

• Voodoo Chile-Jimi Hendrix / Gayageum ver. by Luna - YouTube
  Voodoo Chile-Jimi Hendrix / Gayageum ver. by Luna
• Apple's broken promise: why doesn't iCloud 'just work'? | The Verge
  iCloud, perhaps more than any Apple software product, is meant to "just work." When Apple introduced iCloud, it made clear its hopes to eradicate settings menus and file systems in favor of automation. Steve Jobs pledged to do a better job than he did on MobileMe, Apple’s notoriously horrible stab at web services a few years ago. With iCloud, changes you make to documents on your computer show up instantly on your iPhone and vice versa. "It just works," Jobs exclaimed when he first demoed the service in 2011. "Everything happens automatically," Jobs continued, "and it’s really easy to tie your apps into iCloud’s storage system."
• What If The Google Reader Readers Just Don’t Come Back? | TechCrunch
  If judged by my Twitter stream last week, the shutdown of Google Reader is the biggest story ever in the history of news. Of course, the reality is that Google is likely shutting down the product for a good reason: relatively few people used it, with less using it over time. More wood, fewer arrows, and all that.But that doesn’t mean this move isn’t a mistake for a couple reasons.The first is that Reader’s users, while again, relatively small in number, are hugely influential in the spread of news around the web. In a sense, Reader is the flower that allows the news bees to pollinate the social web. You know all those links you click on and re-share on Twitter and Facebook? They have to first be found somewhere, by someone. And I’d guess a lot of that discovery happens by news junkies using Reader.By killing the flower, Google could also kill the bees. That would be bad for all of us, even if we no longer use Reader or have any clue what RSS is.But the second reason worries me even more because it’s more quantifiable. By killing Reader, Google is likely to harm a lot of publishers, large and small, by eliminating a larger source of traffic.
• 5by5 | The Pipeline #8: Jason Kottke
  Dan Benjamin interviews Jason Kottke, the independent publisher of kottke.org since 1998. They discuss blogging for a living, general vs. niche blogs, content longevity, making the transition to full-time blogging, how taking a break (even for a week) can affect traffic, finding links, guest bloggers, the good and bad of comments, and more.
• Fever° Red hot. Well read.
  Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can't keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you've even abandoned feeds altogether.
• NetNewsWire App
  
• Black Pixel
  Given the discontinuation of Google Reader, I wanted to take a moment to talk about our plans for NetNewsWire.First, we intend to bring sync to future versions of NetNewsWire. It's too soon to go into details about this, but you should know that we recognize how extremely important it is and that it is a top priority for us.Second, even though we've been quiet about it, we have been working on new versions of NetNewsWire for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. We have some great new features and a modern design that we can't wait to show you.
• NewsFire™ (for Mac OS X)
  Simple to use and packed with features, NewsFire makes it a joy to keep atop the constant flow of information on the web.
• Policeman Doug Crossan reports his 13-year-old son Cameron for FRAUD after running up a £3,700 bill on his iPad | Mail Online
  When he discovered he had run up a ?3,700 bill on his father?s credit card playing games on his iPad, Cameron Crossan expected a very stern telling off at least.The 13-year-old was mortified by what he had done ? but worse was to come. For instead of punishing him, his father filed an official police complaint effectively accusing him of fraud.Doug Crossan, 48, said he was horrified when his credit card company informed him of the amount his son had spent on the games in Apple?s online App Store.
• Apple Acquires Indoor Location Company WifiSLAM - Digits - WSJ
  Apple has acquired indoor-GPS company WifiSLAM, a sign that the war over indoor mobile location services is heating up.Apple paid around $20 million for the Silicon Valley-based company, according to a person familiar with the matter who said the deal closed recently.An Apple spokesman confirmed the deal saying the company “buys smaller technology companies from time to time” and generally doesn’t discuss its plans. He declined to comment further.
• Why You Should Buy Apple Now - Seeking Alpha
  Apple (AAPL) is currently experiencing one of the worst sell-offs it has faced in the last decade. In this article, I will attempt to provide many reasons why the company's growth story isn't over and why the stock should be bought at these levels. Reasons for this include that recent growth worries are likely temporary, declining margin fears are overblown and manageable to the extent they occur, new product categories are coming, and that Apple is best positioned to continue to take over new product and service categories as much of the world's gross domestic product becomes tied into the mobile Internet -- and thus transformed and disrupted.
• Apple rolls out fix for password reset security hole, iForgot site back up | iMore.com
  Apple’s iForgot password reset page is now back online, and iMore has verified that the security hole, discovered earlier today in Apple’s password reset page, has been closed.Previously, after providing a victim’s Apple ID and date of birth, an attacker could send a URL to Apple that would change the password for that account, without needing to answer any security questions. In response, Apple blocked access to the password reset page, and a short while later took the entire site down in light of another loophole that still allowed the attack to be performed.This vulnerability came at an interesting time, just a day after Apple began to roll out its two-step verification system. Users who had already enrolled in the new system seem to have been immune from the password reset vulnerability.
• I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found. | Blog – Hooktheory
  In this article, we’ll look at the statistics gathered from 1300 choruses, verses, etc. of popular songs to discover the answer to a few basic questions. First we’ll look at the relative popularity of different chords based on the frequency that they appear in the chord progressions of popular music. Then we’ll begin to look at the relationship that different chords have with one another. For example, if a chord is found in a song, what can we say about the probability for what the next chord will be that comes after it?
• Tom Sawyer
  

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